Fixing the Game

TWO

MAXIMIZING CUSTOMER DELIGHT

There is only one valid definition of a business purpose: to create a customer.

—Peter Drucker, The Practice of Management

On April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil well, under lease to BP, exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing eleven workers and spewing crude oil into the water. BP quickly went into damage-control mode, blaming the rig owners, Transocean, for safety lapses. BP then went on to attempt to minimize the scope of the damage, as CEO Tony Hayward explained: “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.”¹ By the end of May, Hayward, clearly tired of being pilloried by the media and the U.S. ...